In May this year we launched Probes – small programs that enabled you to create highly targeted content feeds. Though these were based on RSS feeds, they could be filtered by keywords and social parameters, which was not possible to do with any kind of tradtional RSS reader. Thus, Probes opened up a new opportunity to create more targeted, personalized and smart feeds.

Now we’re taking things one step further. We’re going beyond RSS to let you make feeds based on keywords.

To create keyword-specific Probes you simply create them in the exact same way as before but with one difference: we have lifted the restriction to add RSS feeds. You can still add social parameters as before, for example let’s say you are interested in ’surfing’ you can now leave “Specify feeds to probe” empty and add “surfing” to keywords field. Below you can see this kind of targeting in action as I create a probe for stories about the Netflix TV-series ‘Orange Is the New Black’:

You can also exclude keywords. Lets say you want to get rid of stories about “web surfing” you can simply add “-web” to keywords so your keywords field looks like this: “surfing, -web”.

As before you can apply social parameters to really quantify your Probes: variables such as “Most commented stories about surfing” or “Surfing stories with more than 1k likes”.

The only thing we haven’t managed for now is to add social parameters to the “live preview” so what you see in live preview is results returned from the keyword(s). Stick with us, we will be adding these in the future.

A few tips to create good probes:

Be as targeted as possible. It is better with keywords like ‘Apple’, ‘Microsoft’ and similar than the general keyword ‘Technology’.

Give an descriptive title. ‘Stories About Dolphins’ is better than ‘Various Stories’.

If needed describe why you have created it.

If your probe creates to many ‘pings’ then adjust it with more targeted keywords or social parameters.

Follow these tips and you’ll have a tool that gets you content that is more interesting and relevant to you than anywhere else.

Last time we updated you, thousands of probes were created, seeking stories on everything from MIT Technology Review to Behavior Habit. The more, better and specific probes you create, the better for the whole community. We’re building a platform of feeds together and this is connecting you to both content and like-minded people in a new and much more effective way than social networks or topic based discovery platforms.

]]>http://ping.it/blog/go-beyond-rss-with-keyword-probes/feed/0http://ping.it/blog/go-beyond-rss-with-keyword-probes/Featured Probes: For Those Who Simply Scrollhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/GdWIqBuhU7M/
http://ping.it/blog/featured-probes-for-those-who-simply-scroll/#commentsMon, 01 Jul 2013 13:36:46 +0000Chrishttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2808Probes are probably the most important feature of Ping.it, but it’s not always obvious how to tap into their power.

It’s a bit like getting your hands on a completely new music instrument, one that you didn’t even know about before. A software version of the stalactpipe organ or a 12-neck guitar. You immediately feel, that you could do some awesome things with it, but you don’t always see what it could be.

And sometimes you don’t care about building fancy filters or sending out smart probes. You don’t feel like actively looking for good content on a specific topic. You don’t even know what would you like to see. You just want something to scroll through and be entertained.

We understand this. Believe it or not, we sometimes feel the same after a hard day’s work. That’s why, to indulge our “inner scroller”, we are now serving four additional probes, created by the Ping.it Team. They’re called “Featured Probes” and they were made to bring you the best of the Web at any given moment. The cream-of-the-crop from major social networks.

Our featured probes are called:

Most shared today

Most liked today

Most discussed today

Most tweeted today

They all post a single update per hour, based on criteria that should be obvious judging by their names. With those probes, we give you a whole new way to use Ping.it. Instead of monitoring several social networks, you can now simply subscribe to any one of them and get 24 most important things happening in the social world each day, delivered straight to your feed.

We hope you’ll enjoy those new probes. You can subscribe them by looking up their names on the “Probes” tab of your homepage.

And if at any moment you think: “this new probe is great, but it would be even better if it could…”, then we have good news for you as well! With our recent update (mentioned in this blog post) creating new probes or modifying existing ones is now easier than ever.

If there is one Ping.it feature that has turned the most heads so far, it’s the probes.

Since we announced them earlier this year, we have been covered by several sites, including The Next Web, and we received many e-mails from people who were genuinely excited by the idea of filtered content discovery.

With probes, Ping.it really proved to be much more than a replacement for Google Reader (that sadly goes offline today, on July 1, 2013).

But while probes are very powerful, they used to be a tough beast to tame. In the prototype version creating a probe was often tricky and required some guesswork. There was no live preview, so you couldn’t verify if your probe worked properly until you launched it. The number of filters was also a bit lacking. Since then, we have worked hard to make creating new probes as easy as posting on a social network.

It seems we’ve finally achieved that! The new version of Ping.it, that’s been on a live server for a couple of days now, introduced a reworked “Create a probe” window. It lets you select any number of feeds, set any criteria or keywords, and then preview your results – all from a single pop-up.

Why settle for regular RSS readers, when you can have a system that also offers powerful and customizable content filters? Would you like to watch game previews from your favorite sites with more than 200 likes on Facebook? Read popular science articles with a “zombie” word in them? With probes, it’s dead easy.

Here’s a short video that highlights just how friendly the probes have become:

]]>http://ping.it/blog/creating-probes-just-got-easier/feed/0http://ping.it/blog/creating-probes-just-got-easier/Gather round: We’ve got newshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/VpyANof1Tzg/
http://ping.it/blog/gather-round-we-got-news/#commentsWed, 08 May 2013 08:00:35 +0000Marius Lianhttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2771At the end of last year we launched Ping.it in closed beta. Since then, we had some great press and thousands of sign-ups from testers across the world. Based on your feedback, we worked hard to make Ping.it the best platform for content discovery.

So, what’s the news? Well, today we’re ready to open Ping.it in public beta, but what we really want to tell you about is one feature that we think is a game changer.

We’ve experimented a lot up to this point; at each stage building a little more of the feature we’re about to showcase today. We now think we’ve created something genuinely useful that can help content discovery in the social world.

The new feature is called “Probes”. These are small apps which go out and retrieve information from across the Web on behalf of the user. They can be created, edited, shared and subscribed to – all by Ping.it users.
For the first time, you’ll be able to personalize content subscriptions to suit your unique interests, rather than being limited to simple RSS feeds as most readers are.

Say you wish to receive updates on “YouTube Videos on Reddit with more than 1 million views”, for example. You can easily create a Probe that uses the APIs of both YouTube and Reddit to draw the information directly to your feed, which can then be shared across the Ping.it platform. It’s a whole new world of content discovery.

What really makes this feature stand out is that in contrast to the passive methods of typical ‘single-feed subscriptions’, our users are able to decide what they deem interesting or useful to “probe” for, and that’s what they’ll see. You – our users – decide, not us.

We’ve pivoted a few times since we started (twists and turns that are inevitable in the path of a startup) but now there is a recognized need for a truly social reader: free from clunk, confusion and irrelevant content. Ping.it has been in the game long before the announced retirement of Google Reader, but now that has happened, our path is clearer than ever before.

Try out the Probes and let us know what you think – we’d love your thoughts, comments and criticisms. You can get in touch via team@ping.it and keep up-to-date by following us on Facebook, Twitter and the blog.

]]>http://ping.it/blog/gather-round-we-got-news/feed/0http://ping.it/blog/gather-round-we-got-news/Probes: The next phase in social content discoveryhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/XjDRORfaCmE/
http://ping.it/blog/probes-the-next-phase-in-social-content-discovery/#commentsWed, 08 May 2013 07:43:04 +0000Marius Lianhttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2769Today Ping.it launched in public beta with the announcement of its new feature, Probes.

Quite simply, Probes are small, content-retrieving apps that are released into the internet to collect specific information. They enable the users to make personalized collections of information on topics of their choice.

For example, if a user wishes to receive updates for “YouTube Videos on Reddit with more than 1 million views”, they can create a Probe that uses the APIs of both YouTube and Reddit to draw the information directly to their feed.

Probes can be copied, adjusted, and shared across the network, making Ping.it a social network for content discovery.

To subscribe to Probes, simply select any existing Probes created by other Ping.it members on the home screen. Your feed will be automatically updated with information from this Probe as soon as it generates some new updates.

Probes can also be copied and adjusted. Clicking ‘Copy’ at the top of any Probe feed, allows you to adjust the parameters of the probe. For example, instead of ‘articles on CNN with more than 1,000 likes’ you may wish to search for TechCrunch articles with the same popularity. Once edited, the Probe can be renamed and saved as your own.

To create and entirely new Probe, you can easily do so by filling out the fields on the ‘Create a Probe’ popup box on the ‘Probes’ tab of the Ping.it home screen. Similarly to copying existing Probes, simply set the requirements of the content you wish to see and name to probe to save it to your feed.

]]>http://ping.it/blog/probes-the-next-phase-in-social-content-discovery/feed/0http://ping.it/blog/probes-the-next-phase-in-social-content-discovery/How Ping.it Groups Workhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/Z1QOwCm5cXI/
http://ping.it/blog/how-ping-it-groups-work/#commentsTue, 18 Dec 2012 15:37:26 +0000Marius Lianhttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2763We have created Ping.it Groups to let Ping.it users create their own social clusters. Each group can have any number of members and can be one of the 3 types:

Contact Group: This is only a group of your own contacts allowing you to ping many people at the same time without them knowing about each other. Instead of adding your contacts one by one you can send to all at the same time.

Private Group: If you want a group of people to communicate privately with each other this is the group you should create. No outside users will see pings to this group.

Public Group: If you want others in the community to join your group then a public group is what you need. When you ping something to this group it will be accessible on “Public groups” under the “Explore” section on home for all users.

Creating a group:

From the Ping.it popup:

Open the popup either from the bookmarklet when visiting a page or pasting the link on Ping.it/home.

There is a link just below the recipient’s box named “Create group”. Click on it to get the “Create group” popup.

In the popup you can fill out name, description and choose the type of a group.

In the same popup at the bottom you can easily add existing contacts to the group.

If you want to add new contacts to the group click on the small “Add contacts” link.

When you’re done, click “Create” at top right.

From the “Groups” tab on your Profile page:

Click “Profile” on top right and then the “Groups” tab on the left side.

Click “Create group” on top to the right of your name.

Follow points 3 to 6 from the description above.

Editing a group:

From the Ping.it popup:

Open the popup either from the bookmarklet when visiting a page or pasting the link on Ping.it/home.

Start writing the name of your group in the recipient’s box (where it says ‘Start typing to add recipients’). Select the group in the search results either by clicking on it or using up and down arrows and hitting ‘Enter’ on your keyboard.

When you see the group in the recipient’s box, you can simply click on the name to open the edit box. See points 3 to 6 in “Creating a group” on how to edit data.

From the “Groups” tab on your Profile page:

Click “Profile” on top right and then the “Groups” tab on the left side.

Find your group in the list and click “Edit”.

See points 3 to 6 in “Creating a group” on how to edit data.

Sending to a group

From the Ping.it popup:

Open the popup either from the bookmarklet when visiting a page or pasting the link on Ping.it/home.

Start writing the name of your group in the recipient’s box (where it says ‘Start typing to add recipients’). Select the group in the search results either by clicking on it or using up and down arrows and hitting ‘Enter’ on your keyboard.

Click “Ping it” and it is sent to the group.

From the “Groups” tab on your profile page:

Click on “Profile” on top right and then the “Groups” tab on the left side.

Find your group in the list and click “Edit”.

Paste the link you want to ping to this group in “URL to ping” text field.

Change subject and message as you like and “ping it”.

More important info

Pinging to multiple groups does not send multiple pings to members of more than one of the groups. They’ll only receive one ping in their inbox.

As a sender be relevant. Ping only what is expected to be pinged to the group based on its name and description.

Spamming is absolutely not allowed so only add your own contacts into your group when you know it is something they would like to receive.

]]>http://ping.it/blog/how-ping-it-groups-work/feed/0http://ping.it/blog/how-ping-it-groups-work/Ping.it goes into public beta on 12/12/12http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/a0DruBTcB0o/
http://ping.it/blog/ping-it-goes-into-public-beta-on-121212/#commentsWed, 12 Dec 2012 11:03:06 +0000Nataliahttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2743Today, on 12 December 2012, Ping.it is officialy going into a public beta, opening our gates to press and media outlets. To mark this important moment, we have prepared a new launch video – we hope you will enjoy it:

What does the media launch mean for you? Most importantly, there should be many new users coming to Ping.it over the next few days, so we encourage you to head to Ping.it and meet them. Also, all invitations are now sent instantly, so if some of your friends were waiting to join Ping.it, now is the time! They just have to use the “Request Invite” button on our homepage, and they will receive an activation link straight away!

And here are some other things that you might check out in the meantime.

Our media launch press release with some fine details, if you’re interested in this sort of things: https://ping.it/press

Have fun and see you on Ping.it!

]]>http://ping.it/blog/ping-it-goes-into-public-beta-on-121212/feed/1http://ping.it/blog/ping-it-goes-into-public-beta-on-121212/Learn who is winning the online sharing battle with our infographichttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/63W-hL92TVA/
http://ping.it/blog/learn-who-is-winning-the-online-sharing-battle-with-our-infographic/#commentsFri, 07 Dec 2012 14:40:31 +0000Nataliahttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2727While as many as 1 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every day, still the “good old email” appeals to 93% online sharers.

Surprised? Check our infographic to learn more surprising facts and learn how Ping.it solves information overload and cleans up the cluttered social streams.

The maintenance that started shortly after the Dublin Web Summit lasted a bit longer than expected, but I guess it will be easy to see why, after you’ve discovered how much we improved in Ping.it.

But first, a little story.

Did you know that nearly 66% of all content sharing happens directly, bypassing social networks? They call this vast area of direct link exchange the Dark Social – a term that has been popularized recently by this article from The Atlantic.

What exactly does Dark Social consist of?

It is fueled by direct e-mails, instant messengers, closed forum posts, mailing groups, and much more. If you have ever pasted a link on Skype to some of your friends, you contributed to the Dark Social sharing. If your aunt sent you some links to favorite recipes in the e-mail, she’d be a part of Dark Social too. Told a guy on chat about a good Web app, and he punched the URL into his browser? Dark Social. Showed a URL during your presentation, and people went on to visit it? Dark Social as well.

Naturally, in this context “dark” is not supposed to mean anything sinister. This kind of sharing is simply invisible and untraceable to popular Web analytics suites. It happens in private two-way communication or in closed social clusters. If there’s anything bad about the Dark Social, it’s only the number of webmasters who went bald scratching their heads at the mysterious spikes of “direct” visits to their site, with no trace in the visible backlinks.

And trust me, there’s a lot of this direct sharing traffic. Over half of adult Americans use Facebook, but still almost all of them supplement it with e-mail direct sharing. That leaves us with the other half that’s not on Facebook – a group that entirely relies on smaller platforms and the Dark Social.

No wonder the first estimate in The Atlantic states that nearly 60% of sharing happens in Dark Social, out of reach of the marketers, analysts, and third party observers.

Of course, this piece by Alexis Madrigal provoked a slew of rebuttal articles. Some of them tried to do the actual science, like this one, by an author who checked what really makes the traffic “dark” or “bright”, and went into some details to explain that “dark” traffic comes from many other places (like bookmarking), and sometimes it is even just a miss-categorized traffic from social networks.

But everyone agrees that traffic from direct, untraceable sharing plays a very major role in our Web life.

Why? Because regardless of the social changes, people still won’t share everything publically. They still have closed circles of friends and family that are impenetrable to the outside networks. They realize that some of the things won’t interest ALL of their Facebook friends, while they might be of use to several individuals. This calls for direct sharing.

But why am I talking about it?

It seems that the new version of Ping.it ventures far into the realm of direct, personal content recommendations. Straight into the Dark Social.

Ping.it is now a simple Web app that makes sending and receiving personal content recommendations faster and easier than before. The main ingredient comes in the form of a nice bookmarklet that lets you recommend a page you’re viewing straight from any browser, with one click, to any combination of your existing contacts across different platforms.

There’s no need to launch any applications, log in to e-mail accounts, write subject lines and messages… What’s probably most important, the recipients don’t have to register to Ping.it in order to receive messages. They are sent, depending on the contact type, either as a direct Facebook message, or as an e-mail. We’ll be working on adding more social integrations, too.

Registering gives you an ability to ping, join and manage groups, and to receive your pings to a nice Web Pingbox, instead of an e-mail.

This solution should appeal to all the Dark Social sharers. It lets them do what they do now, but in a faster and more convenient way. And if that doesn’t sound exciting enough for you, just bear with me. We realize Ping.it (and StormDriver before) has always had a strong content discovery element and that this specific element attracted many of the 17 000 people who registered for tests.

It is still present in our new version.

Apart of private groups, any Ping.it user can also create open groups, that work a bit like topics did, but they are – well – open. Anyone can join, and receive pages pinged by other group members. You can browse them or search them to join something right for you.

Oh, and you can still keep digging through profiles of random strangers to discover what open groups they have and what pings they sent to them. Naturally, private groups and pings to individual contacts remain invisible and 100% personal.

We have really high hopes for this version. The public release is currently scheduled for November 26 (as usual, it might change), but we have already invited our testers back to give our system a proper shake-down, before we show it to the press. We hope you’ll help us too!

Let me finish this with an anecdote. We’ve knownthe power of the Dark Social for a long time now, because at our team we send links to articles and inspiring videos in several various projects every day via personal e-mails, work e-mails and two different instant messengers. We’ve already found out that using Ping.it allows us to separate content recommendations from conversation, and it allows us to store all of the pages we exchange on neat group pages and in personal Pingboxes.

We liked it a lot, and we hope you will to.

]]>http://ping.it/blog/new-ping-it-release-taps-into-dark-social/feed/0http://ping.it/blog/new-ping-it-release-taps-into-dark-social/New Ping.it becomes one of the 55 world’s top startupshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stormdriver/~3/CJ4ldK5XwFI/
http://ping.it/blog/new-ping-it/#commentsThu, 11 Oct 2012 16:41:02 +0000Chrishttp://ping.it/blog/?p=2668If by any chance you have stumbled upon our homepage recently, you probably know that Ping.it went through a massive change. This time, we’re pretty sure it’s going to stay that way. Our new concept is simple, fresh, and so radical that thanks to the re-designed version you’re going to see soon we’ve been chosen as one of the 55 most promising start-ups to take part both in the closed START event and in the Ireland Electric Spark of Genius startup competition on the Dublin Web Summit 2012 conference.

So, what’s so interesting in this new version of Ping.it?

Imagine you found a page that some of your friends could enjoy. Let’s say it’s a hilarious movie review, with humor leaning a bit on the offensive side. You realize, that a couple of your friends would love to see it. But your other Facebook contacts wouldn’t be interested, and some probably wouldn’t even get the joke and could take it the wrong way.

Whenever you share something on social networks, you show it to a lot of people who don’t care, and in the meantime the “right” people can often miss your update.

What can you do? You can create lists or circles on your social account, but that requires a prior knowledge of what you’re going to post. Would you create a G+ circle for “People who get offensive jokes” or a Twitter list for “People who are interested in strange tofu recipies”? Of course not!

Now let’s see how sharing works in Ping.it now. You’re still on a site with a movie review. You click the Ping.it bookmarklet button in your browser, select “John”, “Annie” and “Movie geeks group” from a list of contacts, then you click Ping.it. In seconds they receive an e-mail or a Ping.it message with a link.

That’s it. Really. It’s that simple, and it’s all Ping.it is about now – quickly pinging people about pages you think they might enjoy. In fact, it’s the fastest, simplest link sharing platform out there.

And you can make it even faster by dragging any person or a group to your bookmarks bar as a separate bookmarklet. For example: if you put “My office friends” group on your bar, then one click on the group name will ping them any site you’re viewing now, instantly and directly.

Now you can see why we’re one of the 55 startups chosen to present on START opening gala and the main competition at Dublin Web Summit. This new version of Ping.it shows that even something as mundane as sending links can still be improved. That sometimes, instead of making a big system with huge ambitions, it’s good to simply think about small annoyances each and every one of us faces on the Web – and solve them!

But what about content discovery? About actually FINDING great links? Don’t worry! We know many of you liked this side of Ping.it, so we did our best to keep it intact. The system supports creation of open groups on any topic, which can be visited and subscribed to by anyone. So if you join a group called “technology”, you can receive fresh pings straight to your Pingbox or e-mail, from people interested in tech. From people just like you.

You can still click on random strangers, and see things they ping to open groups they joined, or see who’s in those groups and what other groups he or she likes. You can still dive head-first into this sprawling content sharing community, and browse it until you discover something for yourself.

There’s still much we could discuss – other types of groups, new layouts, your personal Pingbox, but we feel the system is so simple, you should just check it out for yourself! On October 17, in less than a week, we’re going to re-open the gates, and we hope to see you in Ping.it then!

In the meantime, we’re packing our bags and stuff them with freebies and goodies to give away on Dublin Web Summit (stop by our booth to get some). Soon, we’re going to present a re-vamped version of Ping.it on a big stage, in front of many important people from all over the tech realm.